Containers Keep Cashing In: Rancher Labs Secures $10 Million

When Sheng Liang and Shannon Williams left Citrix to start a new thing, many in the industry took notice and wondered what they were up to with their new company, Rancher Labs. Liang and Williams have an impressive resume having created Cloud.com which was eventually acquired by Citrix in a high-profile (and high price tag) acquisition. Cloud.com was rebranded into CloudStack and while not seeing the commercial success it really deserved, many insiders agree it was a strong cloud offering.

So given that history, it was interesting to sit down with Liang and Williams recently at the OpenStack summit to get a teaser for what they're up to. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's containers, the white-hot technology that speeds up the time it takes to get thousands of apps up and running. The company is today announcing a $10 million series A round from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. They're betting that Liang and Williams (alongside Darren Shepherd as chief architect and Will Chan as vice president of engineering) can replicate previous commercial success.

Rancher is talking about creating a computing environment that will be tuned towards organizations running Docker containers in production across public or private resources. The company has two specific offerings, Rancher and RancherOS. RancherOS is a lightweight, container-centric operating system - a minimalist Linux distribution that was designed specifically for running Docker containers. RancherOS enters a busy space. We already have CoreOS from the eponymously-named startup. We have RedHat with its Project Atomic. We have Canonical with Ubuntu Snappy. Seemingly everyone realizes that a lightweight operating system is a ticket to the game.

The OS is just the price of entry, however, and it is through the Rancher product that the company wants to really make a dent. Rancher is a container management platform designed for running Docker at scale. Rancher is about taking all of those small implementations of Docker that exist in test and development stages and helping them scale across teams, projects and broad infrastructure.

Rancher connects users with resources, allowing them to manage the deployment and placement of containers across any hosts they have registered with Rancher. It is integrated with existing user directories (GitHub today and LDAP/AD reportedly in the future) for identity management and collaboration and supports Docker Machine for provisioning resources. Users connect to public or private Docker repositories to manage images and deploy containers on their infrastructure.

Whether they use Rancher’s API or web UI, users can pass through all standard Docker commands when they are creating containers. Once containers are deployed, Rancher provides monitoring and audit logs for each user’s containers. Rancher ticks off a variety of user needs for deploying containers at scale: user management and collaboration, monitoring and logging, administration, networking, load balancing, and storage management-- all within the context of native Docker APIs.

Of course, Rancher has a big challenge. Whether it admits it or not Rancher is heading for a confrontation with a number of players who have a vested interest here: Docker itself, the
Google-backed Kubernetes project, Mesos, and Microsoft. Seemingly every company wants to be the one to layer a fabric of management over containers. It's a big opportunity and where big opportunities lie, lots of competition occurs. That said, Rancher has quite some pedigree.